Effort to Fight Suicide Focuses on ‘the Help and the Hope’

There has been quite a vogue in recent years for what are called random acts of kindness. A new campaign is adding some planning to the mix.

The campaign, now under way, supports Samaritans, a nonprofit organization in metropolitan Boston that works to prevent suicides through initiatives that include telephone help lines. The campaign, being created on a pro bono basis by Hill Holliday, carries the theme “Happier Boston” — quite a departure from the typical efforts for an organization like Samaritans.

The campaign is meant to generate support from Samaritans in several ways, among them recruiting volunteers, raising funds and increasing corporate sponsorships.

The campaign seems to take a page from anti-littering ads decades ago that declared, “A cleaner New York is up to you” by suggesting, in effect, that “A happier Boston is up to you.”

That is underlined by the cheerful tone and look of the campaign, as well as its sub-theme, “Your smile shared,” which resonates with additional meaning in an era of social sharing in media like Twitter.

For instance, Samaritans, which has a presence on Twitter, has created the hashtag “#HappierBoston” to help promote the campaign.

Unlike many pro bono campaigns, which are concentrated in traditional media like television commercials and print advertisements, the “Happier Boston” campaign is primarily experiential — that is, focused on events and other tangible ways to bring the message to life.

Many events, which are termed “social experiments,” are reminiscent of the zany antics of flash mobs. Some test runs took place in recent months, to gauge what the responses might be for the events once the campaign started.

The activities include mock welcoming committees at train stations, where commuters are greeted as they arrive at their destinations; pun-centric “Orange You Happy” giveaways, where volunteers distribute oranges bearing stickers with humorous phrases like “Peel away stress”; and groups of a cappella singers performing for passengers in elevators in office buildings.

The intent of the campaign is explained on the home page of a special Web site, happierboston.org, which is in addition to the regular Samaritans Web site, samaritanshope.org. “Our hypothesis is if you make your voice heard, Boston will be a happier place,” the text on the home page begins. The Happier Boston Web site asks visitors to share photographs and video clips of their “happy spots” and “happy thoughts” and rev up a “Blues Engine,” creating a mock blues song and sharing it online with friends to make “your voice heard.”

There are even celebrities getting into the act. Thomas M. Menino, the mayor of Boston, and David Ortiz, the designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox, have recorded their own blues tunes, which will be featured on the special Web site and in radio commercials.

“Nothing gets me down except potholes,” Mr. Menino confides. “Can’t stop until I fill them all.” And Mr. Ortiz sings about how he misses “baseball in October,” a nod to the awful season the Red Sox had in 2012.

The genesis of the campaign, says Roberta Hurtig, executive director at Samaritans in Boston, was remarks from Vin Capozzi, a Samaritans board member who is also a senior vice president at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

Executives of Samaritans initially met with executives of Hill Holliday, including Mike Sheehan, the chief executive of the agency, in November 2011, Ms. Hurtig says, and met with the agency again, on Feb. 29, to see what Hill Holliday had in mind for a campaign.

“We walked in and saw all these bright colors and smiley faces,” Ms. Hurtig recalls, adding: “We were nervous. You don’t think of suicide prevention and happiness in the same sentence. We were concerned this repositioning would unintentionally diminish the seriousness and importance of our work.”

After the second meeting concluded, “we left, I’d have to say, a little unsure,” Ms. Hurtig says. But by the next day, she adds, she decided that an old saying on Madison Avenue may have some salience: “If advertising doesn’t make you a little uncomfortable, it’s not going to work.”

“When I first joined Samaritans 10 and a half years ago, my family said, ‘That’s going to be so depressing,’” Ms. Hurtig says, but it turned out to be “the best job ever.”

By the same token, the campaign will “change the conversation,” she adds. “Instead of focusing on the sad, it’s focusing on the help and the hope.”

“I can’t tell you how happy I am we embraced this,” Ms. Hurtig says, describing the gist of a recent meeting with executives from a corporate sponsor of Samaritans: “They like it. Who doesn’t want to be part of something that creates happiness?”

Among the events that preceded the formal kickoff of the campaign was one, High Five in the Fifth, that took place on Sept. 22 at Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. (“The Red Sox need a lot to be happy about,” Ms. Hurtig says, laughing.)

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A tune by David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox can be heard on the Samaritans' suicide prevention Web site.

Fans at the game were asked by 50 volunteers wearing T-shirts bearing the happierboston.org Web address, along with the ballpark’s public address announcer, to share high-fives with the fans to their left and right.

There was another dry run at a race on Sept. 29, when Mr. Menino helped hand out oranges bearing the Samaritans stickers.

The official schedule of events began last week and is to continue with two this week, on Tuesday and Friday.

“Starting in January, we want to do at least two to four social experiments a month throughout the year,” Ms. Hurtig says. “We want to surprise people, make them smile, create some buzz.”

“We’re using this as a way to call attention to our message, that at times, anyone struggles,” she adds, “and we’re here at Samaritans to lend an ear, to make sure people are not alone.”

The employees of Hill Holliday, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, are donating the time they spend working on the campaign, which includes creating the special Web site and the radio commercials.

“The knee-jerk reaction would have been to do something that’s depressing, a billboard with someone about to jump off,” says Joe Berkeley, a group creative director at Hill Holliday who is working with Dave Gardiner, also a group creative director, on the campaign.

“Suicide has a stigma to it, and we felt a traditional ad campaign wasn’t going to change that,” Mr. Berkeley says. “We wanted to do something powerful that people would notice.”

An inspiration came from Andrew Butler, another executive working on the campaign. He is a vice president and planning director who had moved to Boston from Tampa, Fla., to join Hill Holliday.

In “thinking about how we could approach this problem,” Mr. Butler writes in an e-mail, he would walk “through downtown, in particular Boston Commons and Beacon Hill” and “nod and/or say hello to people passing me by, something that is common in the South.”

“But after about the umpteenth person looking at me like I had three eyes and was grunting, I realized that Bostonians don’t have that expressive happy gene (particularly in the winter),” Mr. Butler says.

“From there, we thought it would be interesting to see if we could actually create opportunities that would inspire Bostonians to engage with each other, share their voice and make each other happier,” he adds.

The intent, Mr. Berkeley says, is for the events to seem “big, bold, beautiful,” but also have “a grass-roots feel to them” and not be expensive.

The Web site, events and radio commercials are all supposed to convey that suicidal thoughts “can happen to anybody,” he adds, “and to get over it you’ve got to talk to people, get out of your shell.”

Mr. Berkeley acknowledges the offbeat nature of the campaign and agrees that the concept was not what Ms. Hurting “was expecting at all” from the agency.

“I wanted to do something that makes a difference,” he says, adding, “It’s nice to have a white whale on your assignment list.”

Ms. Hurtig also acknowledges the campaign’s unconventional aspects.

“Don’t we wish it were as easy as a smile,” she says. “But a smile can start a connection. Possibilities and hope are created.”

The intent is not to “diminish people’s problems,” Ms. Hurtig says, but rather to declare that “we all have problems, and the nice thing in Boston is we have Samaritans.”

It was not intentional that the campaign begin before Christmas, Ms. Hurtig says, adding that there is not a higher suicide rate during the holidays.

“But as someone who has staffed a crisis line, I’d say the calls are different” then, she says, in that “you can feel you’re more alone” when “everything is about family and you’re estranged from your family” or how “everything is about buying gifts, and you can’t.”

“I answered the phone one New Year’s,” Ms. Hurtig says, “and an elderly woman apologized for calling a suicide hot line but not being suicidal.”

The woman “said she was calling from a nursing home, was all alone and wanted to wish someone a happy new year,” she adds. “For those 15 minutes, she wasn’t alone, and that’s the gift Samaritans gives.”

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